Episode 265 of Anecdotally Speaking explores Quentin Tarantino’s early setback and the value of persistence and learning from failure.

In this episode, Shawn shares the story of a young Quentin Tarantino who, after years of effort into his first film, received devastating feedback. But instead of giving up, Tarantino used the experience, doubled down, and came back stronger.
Mark and Shawn discuss how stories like these demonstrate grit, persistence, and the importance of learning from failure – valuable lessons for business and life alike.
They also unpack storytelling techniques such as raising stakes, adding dialogue, and keeping it relatable.
For your story bank
Tags: Storytelling, Resilience, Persistence, Film, Feedback, Failure
This story starts at 3:05
In 1981, Quentin Tarantino was 17. He dropped out of school and moved to LA, where he got a minimum wage job at a video store called Video Archives. It’s well known he watched lots of movies while working there. He didn’t earn much, but every dollar he made he saved to create his own movie called My Best Friend’s Birthday.
He wrote the script himself—70 pages of wild, crazy energy. He got his friends from acting classes to be in it, begged, borrowed and stole equipment, and even snuck into places to film. It was all done on zero dollars. It took three years to complete.
When it was finished, he showed it to a Hollywood producer whose opinion he really valued. The producer told him: “This film should be wrapped in meat and thrown to the sharks.”
Tarantino was gutted. He couldn’t believe he’d spent three years making something that turned out so poorly. He went back to the people who worked on it, all of whom had done it for free, and told them the film had been destroyed in a lab fire. It wasn’t true, but it was his way of ending it.
It took him a couple of weeks just to get to the point where he could even think about continuing. But after two or three weeks, he decided he wasn’t quitting. That moment after the failure of his first film and deciding to continue is what he later described as the proudest moment of his career.
That film became his film school. He learned how to make movies by doing everything himself. And of course, his next film was Reservoir Dogs.